A Forum for Journalists--both Online and otherwise--that attended the PenplusbYtes-organised two day meeting on Training Journalists for ICT in April 2006. This space is to reunite that group with a view to forming GHAJICT, an association of Journalists in ICT

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

So, a good meeting was had by all on Friday 27 July, 2007 @ BusyInternet. The following members of the GHAJICT Executive were present to pay dues towards the establishment of the Association of Ghanaian Journalists in ICT (GHAJICT).

Exhortations by the President to join the FACEBOOK Group of GHAJICT notwithstanding, the members pledged to do their best to join. Enoch Darfah Frimpong, and Isaac Tetteh are already members of the group, which you can visit here.

Each of the members paid a cool çGH15 (ç150,000) each, amounting to çGH60 (ç600,000).

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Yesterday I went out with the GINKS secretariat to meet Emmanuel K. Bensah , one of the most fanatic bloggers in Ghana. I met Emmanuel through his blog. When we connected on facebook by mistake he had stated that we met in school, but actually the category 'met through their blogs' is missing...

It was very nice to exchange blog and vlog tips, and discuss the Ghanaian blogosphere which is too quiet according to Emmanuel. He is an author for the globalvoices for Ghana. This means that he reads about 15-20 blogs and when he thinks something is interesting for a global audience that doesn't know much about Ghana he forwards it to the editor, who then edits and puts it up the globalvoices site. This is a huge opportunity for bloggers to get known (this is how I found Emmanuel's blog) and to be crossposted to a wider audience. He told us globalvoices now has a feed into the Reuter's Africa site. On each country page there is a feed with blogposts, see the example for Ghana. We discussed ways of leveraging the GINKS vlog with ICT4D stories, a possible blogmentoring project and tried to start a Ghanaian vloggers group (so far with 3 members :). I forgot to ask whether the Ghanaian bloggers ever meet.

We had a good brainstorm about the developing of ICT uses in Ghana. Emmanuel was very enthousiastic about his GPRS phone which allows him to connect to the internet by mobile phone. It is not extremely expensive and you can set it to see what you used. When he's offline, he uses his onetouch pay-as-you-go subscription to check and reply to mails and even to go to facebook. I still have my video-ipod dream (in combination with videoblogs) . Mobile television is coming through ghana telecom/onetouch. So enough work for GINKS...